Modernism and the New Spain

Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History

Gayle Rogers

Description

How and why did a country seen as remote, backwards, and barely European become a pivotal site for reinventing the continent after the Great War? Modernism and the New Spain argues that the "Spanish problem"-the nation's historically troubled relationship with Europe-provided an animating impulse for interwar literary modernism and for new conceptions of cosmopolitanism. Drawing on works in a variety of genres, Gayle Rogers reconstructs an archive of cross-cultural exchanges to reveal the mutual constitution of two modernist movements-one in Britain, the other in Spain, and stretching at key moments in between to Ireland and the Americas.

Several sites of transnational collaboration form the core of Rogers's innovative literary history. The relationship between T. S. Eliot's Criterion and José Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente shows how the two journals joined to promote a cosmopolitan agenda. A similar case of kindred spirits appears with the 1922 publication of Joyce's Ulysses. The novel's forward-thinking sentiments on race and nation resonated powerfully within Spain, where a generation of writers searched for non-statist forms through which they might express a new European Hispanicity. These cultural ties between the Anglo-Irish and Spanish-speaking worlds increased with the outbreak of civil war in 1936. Rogers explores the connections between fighting Spanish fascism and dismantling the English patriarchal system in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, along with the international, anti-fascist poetic community formed by Stephen Spender, Manuel Altolaguirre, and others as they sought to establish Federico García Lorca as an apolitical Spanish-European poet.

Mining a rich array of sources that includes novels, periodicals, biographies, translations, and poetry in English and in Spanish, Modernism and the New Spain adds a vital new international perspective to modernist studies, revealing how writers created alliances that unified local and international reforms to reinvent Europe not in the London-Paris-Berlin nexus, but in Madrid.

Chapter Five Spain in Translation and Revision: Spender, Altolaguirre, and Lorca in British Literary Culture...................................................................................... Conclusion Modernism, War, and the Memory of Spain after 1939........................................

Author Information

Modernism and the New Spain

Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History

Gayle Rogers

Reviews and Awards

"The numerous revelations in this book and the light they shine on the Europeanist vision that dominated Anglo-Hispanic literary movements of the early twentieth century ... make it indispensible reading for scholars of the Silver Age ... and transatlantic modernism/modernismo." --María A. Salgado, Romance Notes

"The strengths of Modernism and the New Spain are many: ... its excellent organization, the rigor of its research, ... the originality of various parts of the studies, and the aim of refuting the well-known arguments that have defined Hispanic modernism as a secondary movement. ... Rogers offers a novel view [of modernism] while providing the reader with a profound analysis of an important chapter of literary history. ... One of the outstanding contributions and penetrating studies of the Spanish Silver Age, and essential for future specialists in the field." --José M. del Pino, Revista Hispánica Moderna

"Gayle Rogers has done a wonderful job of showing how British and Spanish modernism were connected. Calmly, clearly, and richly, he traces the relationships among British and Hispanic periodicals and writers, bringing to light connections that, for most of us, have been in the dark until this moment." --Robert Scholes, Brown University

"Modernism and the New Spain is not an ordinary contribution to the revaluation of modernism and its margins, but one that crucially forces us to grasp the incomprehensible exclusion of Spain in the canonical map. In a brilliant comparative literary history, Rogers proposes a fluid modernist topography animated by transnational exchanges. An essential and exciting book on the roots of our incomplete modernity." --Domingo Ródenas de Moya, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

"Gayle Rogers's Modernism and the New Spain challenges the notion that global modernist studies and modern periodical and mass media studies are utterly separate and somewhat hostile scholarly enterprises. His study offers a highly original re-mapping of Spanish, British and European modernist cultures through its recovery of the 'polyglot public spheres' that were constituted through a transnational network of periodicals." --Ann Ardis, University of Delaware

"Meticulously researched and fluent...A fascinating and important new entry in modernist studies." --Woolf Studies Annual

"[A] superb example of how to approach the globality of the modernist phenomenon. ...[H]ighly productive... Modernism and the New Spain presents a valuable contribution to modernist studies that is, in turn, indispensable for those interested in Anglo-Spanish relations (from one side or the other) and, ultimately, in a transnational, cosmopolitan, and dialogic vision of the literature of the first half of the twentieth century." --Cincinnati Romance Review

"[S]tructured with intelligence and perfectly interrelated...written with fluidity and grace...stands as possibly one of the most complete studies of Anglo-Spanish cultural relations in the interwar period that has been published to date." --Revista de Estudios Orteguianos

"A significant contribution to transnational literary studies, Rogers's Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History weaves seemingly disparate sources into a cohesive narrative that reevaluates and enriches scholarship on Hispanic and Anglophone Modernisms. By demonstrating how strong cultural exchange impacted both literary traditions and emphasizing international feminism's pivotal role in this network of exchange, Rogers provides a pertinent revision of Spanish and Anglo literary histories." --Vanessa Fernández, Hispania

"[A] beautiful, rigorous contribution to Modernist Studies that brings a fresh look at this intense period between the two wars." --Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez

"Valuing adaptation, Modernism and the New Spain adds to modernism's history, registering in its own production the ongoing legacy of the modernist past. Intermedial and international, modernism appears in Rogers' important book as an effect of cosmopolitanism, imagined at, with, and for the southwestern edges of Europe. ...remarkable, witty, and appealing as a model for future scholarship." --Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Modernism/modernity

"Breaks new ground...Rogers is doing strong conceptual work because his criticism remains historically grounded." --Translation Studies